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Canada earthquake causes rumbling in Rochester

Staff report
8:54 p.m. EDT May 17, 2013

A recordings of today's earthquake on the seismograph station at the University of Rochester in Rochester on May 17, 2013. The earthquake orginated north of the Adirondacks in Canada.(Photo: TINA YEE, staff photographer)

A relatively strong earthquake centered in Canada caused a rumbling felt in the Rochester area Friday at approximately 9:45 a.m.

The quake, whose magnitude was preliminarily set at 5.0 or 5.1, was centered near Shawville, a village in western Canada about 45 miles northwest of the Canadian capital city, Ottawa.

The epicenter was not far from the locus of a similarly sized earthquake felt in Rochester in June 2010.

The city of Rochester’s 9-1-1 dispatch center received a small handful of calls in the half hour after the earthquake.

Fewer than a dozen people, a center spokesperson said, called and none of the calls were for injuries.

Rochesterians on Twitter and other social networks indicated it was felt all over the region.

“I was sitting having my coffee about five minutes ago and the kitchen table started shaking,” Louis Grande of Penfield said about 9:50 a.m.

Mike Giambrone, 48, of Perinton was in his office at Siemens at Woodcliff in Perinton when he felt shaking.

“I was shaking and I looked at my desk and it was shaking,” Giambrone said.

Giambrone said the shaking occurred twice for about two seconds each time. One of his coworkers saw the water in her water bottle shaking.

“It was weird,” said Giambrone, who had never experienced an earthquake before. “There was no hysteria. People were just like ‘I think that was an earthquake.’”

“That’s an active area with the potential for damaging earthquakes. In that sense, today’s earthquake was not a surprise, though it’s not an everyday event,” said John Ebel, director of the Weston Observatory at Boston College.

The area of western Quebec where Friday’s quake was centered is well-known to earthquake experts.

“It’s an area of persistent seismicity,” Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester. She said there had been foreshocks over the past week — smaller temblors that foreshadowed Friday’s larger event, whose epicenter was near Shawville, Quebec.

Another quake of magnitude 5.0 occurred about 50 east of Shawville on June 23, 2010. That event was felt in western New York as well.

Ebel said the same seismic area was home to a magnitude 6.2 quake in 1935. That one caused the collapse of a railroad embankment and some structural damage.

Ebel said he wouldn’t expect anything of that nature from Friday’s event. “A magnitude 5 is right at the threshold at which damage starts. There could be chimney damage, cracked plaster, things being knocked off shelves. I would not expect anything major like building collapses.”